'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm • Hacker News Board

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#511

Post by barking_biscuit » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #330

codegeek wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years. Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE…

> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company Not really. Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. Middle managers love to schedule irrelevant meetings, but they will provide some business justification to themselves and to others. You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves. It'…

>You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves

This.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#512

Post by tonioab » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

The job market for top engineers is supply-constrained, as demonstrated by the rapid increase in SWE wages in the past 15 years. If you agree that top engineers are the primary input to these companies' success, then it makes sense for them to adopt a "hoarding" behavior.

In other words, these companies have over-hired as a way to prevent competitors from hiring these same engineers. Although this has created a situation where the company has hired past the theoretical "productive" point, it was still a rational behavior.

Now that the tide is turning, the productivity goal becomes relatively more important than the competitive goal. In the long run though, I don't think the job market will fundamentally change - there is still a shortage of top engineering talent in the US.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#513

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:15 PM UTC

fefe23 wrote: post #245

As a consultant, I come around a bit. I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "develo…

[deleted]

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#514

Post by zhengyi13 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:16 PM UTC

ryneandal wrote: post #451

commandlinefan wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> company calendar is 80% filled with meetings The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing programming work.

Typical where? I've _never_ had to deal with such a schedule.

When I've shoulder-surfed my managers and PMs for roughly the last ten years, they're all like that: wall-to-wall meetings. Any technical work they do (and here at least, (T)PMs are expected to potentially contribute technical work) is done outside 9-5.

Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see it, at least.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#515

Post by anigbrowl » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

When management starts blaming the employees for the lack of direction, it's over. Both FB and Google are as disruptable now as they have ever been. FB's main competition is Telegram, imho. Google has more of an incumbent advantage but less of a strategic vision.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#516

Post by goodpoint » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

codegeek wrote: post #287

fefe23 wrote: post #245

As a consultant, I come around a bit. I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "develo…

"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years. Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE…

>> "Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." > I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company.

No, the parent is right. Psychological research shows clearly that people don't want to be dead weights. They lose motivation and become burned out for many reasons.

And it's entirely the company responsibility to address the problem.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#517

Post by cartweheel » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

I worked at a place where the VP of engineering didn't understand anything about engineering nor his department. Lifers who shunned any type of responsibility were given free reign to continue their ways and made sure to spread their attitude to new hires in their teams. The VP promoted a total whack to be the overall architect which came up with one stupid idea after another disrupting all operations. A complete overflowed influx of fresh product managers and mid-level people managers with zero engineering experience created an even worse hierarchical political mess where it was now impossible to give any sort of proper feedback. Orders would come through several layers before it reached some low level grunt without a fancy title who would finally recognize that the orders made absolutely no fucking sense, yet had no way to resist them. Many of the actually talented but overworked doers left. All the problems in this organization lay squarely with the leadership and their inaptitude with regards to engineering. When a nice image of an organization is valued more than actually valuable work, this is what you get.

I've heard similar stories from other places as well, because I went looking, and I really wanted to know if what I had seen was unique. It unfortunately wasn't, although I couldn't find an example as bad as mine. Similar types of stories and situations existed in most places, but not in an as concentrated fashion it seemed.

So when I hear anyone complaining like Zuck or Pichai, I know where to look for the problem. The non-engineer managers who provide no value themselves, don't understand what makes engineering tick, and prevent those that do to get their ideas through, unless they can take credit for them and with low risk. Elon Musk is right on this point. Unfortunately they've already infested themselves so tightly in the fabric of the organization, patting each others backs, that it is impossible to get them out. These same people are now going to be put in charge of throwing the "garbage" out. Ha ha ha.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#518

Post by cutemonster » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:18 PM UTC

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #397

my_usernam3 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My millage is that it's not absolute "dead weight". It's more wanting limited responsibility and tasks that require limited scope/time spent, but does actually contribute, just a much smaller scale than others. > The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight. My guess from your comment is that you judge them for being slackers, an…

Do you feel the same way about people who put effort in but are not skilled enough to contribute (or make things worse by trying)?

> people who put effort in ... make things worse

Dead weight? Sounds more like friendly antimatter

GP:

> > I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps

For me, that depends on what the company is doing. Let's say it's mobile games or quant trading -- then, slacking at work in a way just gives people more time away from the computer (fewer games to play?). And changes which ones of the rich people, get richer.

Then what does it matter.

Whilst if one is working for a hospital or a stopping-online-manipulation department, then, in such cases, slacking is sad, not good for society, right

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#519

Post by bcrosby95 » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

weard_beard wrote: post #492

dboreham wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.

I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's structured and detailed enough that our developers are generally happy if they get to choose the variable names.

This isn't anything like how a place like Google or Facebook works.

I would guess that the vast majority of developers (I daresay 100% of them) posting on HN would not like to work at a place like that.

Re: 'Too many employees, but few work': Pichai, Zuckerberg sound the alarm

#520

Post by djkivi » Wed, Aug 10, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #394

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how I think of it. You pay firemen for their ability to solve a problem quickly and efficiently, and for being able to execute when called upon. Giant companies making money hand over fist pay a lot of "don't fuck this up" salaries. The primary goal for everyone is to keep the money printer running smoothly; everything else is secondary.

It's worth noting that the beginning, the end and the middle of Scrum and what most companies laughably call "Agile" is to prevent exactly this: the entire structure is there to force every developer to interview for their job every morning and prove they're making "contributions" (it doesn't matter if they're good contributions, they just have to be completed by the deadlines).

Such a beautiful metaphor for the daily standup!